The last registry hive has a lot of setting… and why should you’re creating an administrator account anyway?

For this guide I will create a Template user with the name “robinhobo-com”.

Step 4 – Login with the Template account you just created

Login with the local user account created in step 3 and do the necessary customizations. To keep the profile as clean as possible, customize only what is necessary. Mostly I customize the Pinned Items, the System Tray icons behaviour and some Start Menu properties.

I also remove all the public folders from the users Libraries. You can do this while customize the template user or afterwards by editing the library XML files (see step 5).

To clear the recently opened programs in the Start menu (as shown in the right image below), open the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties, open the Start Menu tab, unselect “Store and display recently opened programs in the Start menu” and “Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar” (as shown in the left image below), hit the Apply button. Now select both options again and click Apply.

When you’re done with the customization of the profile, log out.

Step 5 – Clean up the Template user

First of all, I will make a local backup copy of the profile. As you can see in the picture below, all unnecessary shortcuts from the profile are automatically removed by this copy action.

I will use the backup copy to finish the Mandatory profile. The next step is to load the NTUSER.DAT in the Registry Editor.

Open the Registry Editor, select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, open the File menu and select Load Hive..

Enter a key name, in this case I will give the key the name “PROFILEMAN”.

Right click the Loaded Hive and select Permissions. Remove the template user and the administrators group. Add Authenticated Users and give this group Full Control permissions. Click OK.

Consider whether you can empty / delete the following registry keys in your environment;

Within the <loaded hive> search for the template user name and replace it with %username%, except for Shell Folders.

Shell Folders

Shell Folders is a different story. Some people leave as it is, some people replaces the Template username with %username% and some people delete all the Shell Folder keys.
The problem is that some applications needs this keys to work well and they cannot handle with variables.

I will delete the keys except the “(default)”, “!Do not use this registry key” and “Fonts” and let Windows recreate the keys with the Active Setup at user logon.

On the Target tab select “Basic – Redirect everyone’s folder to the same location”. By Target folder location select “Create a folder for each user under the root path”. By Root Path fill in the share created in step 2. Make sure that “Grant the user exclusive rights to Documents” is deselected on the Settings tab.

To disable the message “Some library features are unavailable due to unsupported library locations” from appearing apply the following policy;

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